Wednesday, January 5, 2011

The leaked PS3 root key has spawned its first public hack, with instructions surfacing on how owners can create their own custom firmware. If you’ve got Linux and some skills in the field of programming, you can now do exactly that. Capitalising on the work done last week by the fail0verflow team in breaking the PS3′s copy protection wide open, KaKaRoTo has released a set of tools that allow users to create their own, custom piece of PS3 firmware. The actual usefulness of the hack is questionable at this stage; there’s no support for running homebrew apps or backup copies of games, and according to the creator it’s all “really meant for future homebrew installation” and “will not allow piracy.”

The advantage here is that you can do it for any firmware, if you want to keep version 3.41, then give it the 3.41 update, if you are on 3.55 already and can’t downgrade, then run the script on the official 3.55 firmware and it will create a modified 3.55 firmware.You can put the file in a USB drive under the filename “PS3/UPDATE/PS3UPDAT.PUP” and then go to system update in the XMB, and it will allow you to install the update (even if you’re already on 3.55).

That might come as some relief to Sony, who were facing the possibility of pirated games being run on PS3 consoles no matter which firmware version they were running, but it seems only a matter of time until someone less copyright-conscious comes along with an alternate hack.